KevinGutowski

I often get asked if I use anything I learned from physics in my designs.

And while its helpful to be able to communicate about shared math and physics concepts with engineers,

the thing that I use the most from physics is....

The

Scientific

Method

to my design process.

01

Formulate a hypothesis

I first figure out what questions I want to ask, collect exisiting data related to these questions, and come up with predicitions.

02

Test the hypothesis

I test my hypothesis with a wide variety of experiments. A few of these include testing usability with user testing, measuring feasibility by checking in with developers, confirming prioritization by reviewing with stakeholders, and evaluating product fit by interviewing users.

03

Form Conclusions

I review my testing and analyze the data that I collected to draw a conclusion. If my conclusion doesn’t align with my hypothesis, I’ll formulate another hypothesis and repeat the process.

04

Communiciate Results

Conclusions are communicated and documented regardless of whether they match the hypothesis or not. It’s not enough for designs to be just implemented. Implementation should be supported with how and why the designs are being proposed so that all team members are on the same page. Also, it helps with any further problems that may arise at a later time.

Current Work

I'm a designer at Gradescope, an online platform where instructors can grade paper-based assignments. I've helped with accessibility initiatives, established a flexible workflow to grade with AI-assistance, created materials for various marketing campaigns, and recently launched a new landing page.

Student Submission Workflow

Students submit a wide variety of work on Gradescope ranging from lab reports to short quizes. When submitting work, students are required to indicate where their responses located for each question. Depending on the number of questions and number of pages submitted, it's often easier to map questions to pages or pages to questions. This interface supports both workflows.

Automatic Student Matching

One of the inconviences of digital grading is somehow mapping digitized submissions to students in a roster. Prevously, TAs and instructors would have to manually match each student to each submission. Now, instructors just need to review our A.I. system that does it for them.

Text Annotations

The ability to type directly on a student's submission is one of Gradescope's most popular feature requests. Rather than doing a "Preview" style approach where text is applied directly on top of the page, we opted for a note style and added a dot so that instructors can pinpoint the exact location for their feedback and where it refers to.

A.I. Assisted Grading

Instructors are able to grade faster using groups of answers. An A.I. system reviews the student marks to a question and forms them into suggested groups. The grader then reviews the proposed groups, moves any uncertain ungrouped answers into groups, and then is able to grade each group.

New Landing Page

To give instructors a better sense of how Gradescope works, we focused on giving examples of graded work across various subjects. Rather than seeing some generic math problem, we are able to provide complex examples that showcase the flexibility and maturity of the platform.

Side Projects

I make little apps for designers with a foucs on color and useful utilities.

Color Contrast Picker

Frustrated by guess-and-checking to fix inaccessible color pairings, I built this webapp with D3 to get an intutive sense for satistifing WCAG contrast requirements.